A plug-in-application recipe (“PIAR”) is a set that includes a triggering event (referred to herein as a “trigger” or “trigger condition”) and an action, arranged logically as an if-then formulation. The “if” portion of the formulation corresponds to a PIAR trigger condition. The “then” portion of the formulation is conditioned on the “if” portion being satisfied, and corresponds to a triggerable action. A plug-in application may supply the action. A plug-in application that supplies an action may be the same as, or different than, a plug-in application that supplies a trigger.
A PIAR management application presents an interface that allows a user to define PIAR's. A PIAR definition indicates one or more actions to be executed by the PIAR management application. A PIAR definition further indicates a trigger of a plug-in application. When a PIAR management application detects that a trigger condition is satisfied, the PIAR executes the action(s) corresponding to the detected trigger.
A PIAR management application may be used for many purposes. For example, a PIAR management application may be used to automate repetitive tasks. Examples of PIARs include, but are not limited to: (a) responsive to detecting that a user's car is in the user's driveway (trigger), opening the user's garage door (action); (b) responsive to determining that a user's walked steps have not reached a particular goal by 5 p.m. (trigger), transmitting a notification to the user (action); (c) responsive to detecting a new sales contact in an address book or email (trigger), creating a new folder to store information about the sales contact (action).
The term “plug-in application” refers to the fact that an application's trigger(s) and/or action(s) logically ‘plug in’ to a PIAR management application and thus become part of a PIAR's logic. For example, a PIAR management application may be organized according to a micro-services architecture, such that several independent services are plugged into the PIAR management application. A plugged-in service may provide monitoring service(s) specific to a particular application, to support trigger(s) for the particular application. Alternatively or in addition, a plugged-in service may provide action service(s) specific to a particular application, to support executing action(s) for that particular application.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.